C

by Tom McCarthy (Knopf; $25.95)

One could mistake “C” for a historical picaresque, about the life and adventures of a British boy born on the cusp of the twentieth century. But from the beginning there is a surfeit of quirky detail: the boy grows up on a silkworm farm, where, amid constantly mating insects, his father dabbles in wireless technology and runs a school for deaf children, who are trained to recite Spenser. Their voices sound “ventriloquised almost, as though piped in from somewhere else”—an apt description of the novel itself, which is animated not by lifelike characters for whose fates we fear but by the prowling, quivering mind of its author. The book makes a fetish of literary allusion; it is brilliant and joyless. Still, McCarthy stages memorable set pieces—a spell at a “Magic Mountain”-esque sanatorium, a fraudulent séance—and his prose, when it’s not sagging under encyclopedic research, can glitter: the hero senses “vague impressions of bodies hovering just beyond the threshold of the visible, and corresponding signals not quite separable from the noise around them.” ♦